1913, THE YEAR BEFORE THE STORM, by Florian Illies, translated by
Shaun Whiteside and Jamie Lee Searle.
The Clerkenwell Press – ISBN 978 1 84668 951 2
In the rolling hills just south of the little village of Neuville St Vaast, in Northern France, is a War
Cemetery. Here, tightly packed, thousands of simple granite crosses stretch as far as the eye can see.
Nothing can prepare the visitor for the scale of the place, which is only increased by the realisation
that each cross carries two names, one on each branch, and then another two on the other side. In
total the small commune of Neuville St Vaast holds the remains of 44,833 German soldiers, four to
a grave, as well as 12,210 French, and 1,567 British and Commonwealth soldiers – and that’s not
counting the thousands whose bodies were never found. Such places are inescapable reminders of
the cost of the Great War, the best possible evidence of a tortured age. Like the concentration
camps, military cemeteries of the Western Front are among the rare relics of our recent past which
seem utterly abhorrent, which beg the question: how did it ever come to this?
As Christopher Clark wrote in last month’s LRB, 'the debate over the origins of the First
World War is older than the war itself'. 1 It has been estimated that 25,000 books and articles have
been in written on the subject, in English alone. Three recent additions to the pile are worth
mentioning: The War that Ended Peace by Margaret MacMillan, July 1914: Countdown to War by
Sean McMeekin, and Clark’s own widely-acclaimed The Sleepwalkers: How Europe went to War
in 1914, which each achieve the feat of bringing something new to the debate. No doubt more will
1 Christopher Clark, 'The First Calamity', London Review of Books, vol.35, No.16, p.5.
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follow next year and in years to come. Yet just as interesting, and currently receiving similar
attention, is the period that immediately preceded the war, the last days of the decadent Belle
Epoque, sufused in literature and the public mind with images of long summer afternoons, garden
parties, aristocratic balls.
Perhaps surprisingly, one of the most successful of the works addressing this period is a slim
volume by the German ‘man of style’ Florian Illies. Lacking the political angle of Michael Portillo’s
Radio 4 series 1913, The Year Before, and the global span of Charles Emerson’s 1913, The World
before the Great War, 1913, the Year Before the Storm is a light-hearted romp through the year’s high
cultural scene by the German Art historian, dealer and journalist. Vienna, home to Freud, Klimt,
Schiele, Loos, and Kokoschka, is at the heart of the book, with regular forays to Berlin, Munich,
Paris, various seaside and spa resorts, and, very occasionally, that backwater of Hochkultur,
London. Through twelve chapters, one for each month, anecdotes and meetings are told in the
present tense, as ironic comments fank diary entries and excerpts from letters. Much space is given
to the insecure relationships between Rilke and, among others, Lou Andreas-Salomé; Gottfried
Benn and Else Lasker-Schüler; Oskar Kokoschka and Alma Mahler.
The tone is playful throughout, immediately likeable, and rendered with care and ability by
the two translators. Early in the frst chapter comes the single-sentence paragraph “Speaking of
sickly: where is Rilke, by the way?” It embodies the book – well-turned, familiar, spirited, gently
mocking of its subject. It is an achievement that amongst all the creative, egotistical voices belonging
to his subjects, the author’s still dominates. Among other idiosyncrasies, Illies displays a pleasing
obsession with addresses. Thomas Mann buys a plot of land at 1 Poschingerstrasse while his
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brother Heinrich lives with his wife at 49 Leopoldstrasse, both in Munich; Dr Sigmund Freud’s
residence is at 19 Berggasse, in Vienna; Marcel Proust’s study, we learn, was at 102 Boulevad
Haussmann in Paris. A reader equipped with Google glasses would no doubt fnd her experience
greatly enhanced by calling up street-views as they went along. Indeed, the fact that 1913 is the
perfect antidote to British cultural and historical anglo-centrism means that for those of us with a
tenuous grasp of early 20th century German and Austro-Hungarian culture, having a reference
book or laptop at hand is invaluable when reading. Several characters, unknown to the nonacademic reader at the start of the book, will be hardly more familiar by its end. Ernst Ludwig
Kirchner anyone? Lovis Corinth? Some paragraphs are as short and, to me, as meaningless as ‘On
29 March Karl Kraus delivers a lecture in the Vierjarhreszeiten-Saal in Munich. Among the
audience is Heinrich Mann. Warm applause.’ Others are unforgettable: the frst time a 12-year-old
Louis Armstrong picked up a trumpet; the fact that ecstasy was developed in January 1913, only to
be forgotten. What would the world have been like if 1913 had been the frst Summer of Love?
Perhaps it wouldn’t have changed a thing, but there can be few more entertaining questions in the
fruitless feld on what-if history.
Why this obsession with 1913? Our interest in the year is two-fold: frstly the abrupt
juxtaposition between perceived peaceful prosperity and total war; secondly the not-so-distant
mirror 1913 ofers up to our own time. For the latter the geopolitical and economic parallels are
well-rehearsed, the social and cultural ones maybe less so, in part precisely because of the distorting
efect of hindsight. The main tenet of Portillo’s 10-part radio series is that the natural emphasis on
the awfulness of the war has hidden from view the reality and complexity of the preceding year, in
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particular since the re-evaluation of the war which took place in the 1930s, with the realisation that
Germany had only been temporarily subdued, the terror that War might return, the appalling
thought that such unfathomable losses may, after all, have been in vain. The natural reaction then is
to idealise the world that the War had ended and which would never, it was now clear, return.
Portillo argues, mostly successfully, that 1913, far from being a late fowering of the Edwardian
Summer, had in actual fact been a time of turbulence and strife, and that the War slowed and held
back change, rather than accelerating it.
In comparison, llies is obviously keen to keep his book an uncomplicated one; he doesn’t try
to block out hindsight, nor is he a slave to it. His is a snapshot of a time and a place, yet as the
English subtitle suggests (the German is ‘The Summer of the Century’), everything is considered
with one eye on what is to follow - why else include Franz Ferdinand in a dramatis personae
otherwise flled with artists, poets, playwrights and composers? Hitler and Stalin are also included
for misdeeds to come. It has been said, by Philip Oltermann in the Guardian, that Illies is keen to let
the First World War generation of the hook.2 It is not clear to me that he is. Like Clark, though his
subject is altogether a diferent one, Illies has no time for the blame game which preoccupies so
many historians, but there is a pervading sense of the sickness of the society he describes. The
mocking tone may be afectionate, but it is persistent and signifcant. Franz Kafa in particular is
exposed with delicious cruelty as a self-destructive, faltering wreck; Brecht is a sickly teenage
fantasist; Rilke fits about Europe at others’ expense, feeling uniquely sorry for himself (actually no
– Georg Trakl’s depression and self-loathing is even greater); Kokoschka’s art can only be inspired
2 Phillip Oltermann, '1913: The Year Before the Storm by Florian Illies – review', The Guardian, 19/07/2013.
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by his obsessional, sex-driven love for Alma Mahler, Gustav’s beautiful widow; Gottfried Benn cuts
up cadavers and breaks hearts; Stefan George uses poetry to establish around himself a circle of
sexually submissive youths. Almost alone, Marcel Duchamp endears himself to the reader,
holidaying in Herne Bay, avoiding work and playing chess – in short, enjoying himself. Everything
else seems mad, out of sorts, nervous and strained. The nihilism and sense of futility, so easily
associated with the following four years and their aftermath, are almost overwhelming in this 1913.
With little common ground in terms of style or tone, the same might be said of Matthew Hollis’
beautiful and sad Now All Roads Lead to France, The Last Years of Edward Thomas, in which many
English poets seem just as prone to self-pity and egotistical self-destruction as their continental
peers. Indeed Hollis describes an episode from November 1913 which Illies would surely have
delighted in: Filippo Marinetti’s recital for the Poetry Bookshop at 35 Devonshire Street, in
Bloomsbury, during which the Italian Futurist loudly impersonated the sound of a machine gun,
symbol of Modernity, to an audience which certainly included many sensitive young men who,
within a year or two, would hear the real thing.
The genius of 1913 was a tortured one, and it is hard to resist the impression that the Great
War was in some measure of its time. Illies’ October 1913 in particular seems to have come four
years too early: a monument to the Battle of the Nations is unveiled (referring to the Napoleonic
Wars), German Youth gathers on a mountain-side to swear to no longer bow to militarism and
unthinking patriotism, the painter Ludwig Meidmen paints horrifc visions of war, entitled
‘Apocalyptic Landscape’, and ‘Vision of the Trenches.’ Illies’ 1913 is not a carefree summer, for one
thing the weather seems to have been execrable in Germany, though it seems well above the
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Portillo’s era of turbulence. Fittingly for a cultural history, the abiding impression is one of feeling
over fact, in this case angst and nervousness: the sensation of a creative age that somehow sensed
that it was indeed on the eve of a storm. It is Illies’ triumph to have not only conveyed that feeling,
but to have done so with such wit and lightness of touch. 1913 is all the more captivating for being a
melancholy stroll in a very foreign land.
J. S. CROCKETT
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